The head of Ontario's Amazon bid says province won't offer billions in grants

The man heading up Ontario's effort to lure Amazon to the province says the bid will not offer billions in subsidies to the tech giant.

Ed Clark says providing large taxpayer subsidies to the firm wouldn't be fair to other companies that have set up shop in Ontario with little or no government assistance.

Clark, who retired as an executive with TD Bank in 2014, was appointed last week by Premier Kathleen Wynne to head up the Greater Toronto Region's bid to become the home of Amazon's new corporate headquarters.

The online retail giant announced earlier this month that it is hunting for a second North American office, saying it would spend $5 billion to build the new headquarters to house as many as 50,000 employees.

The company said it wants to be near a metropolitan area with more than a million people; be able to attract top technical talent; be within 45 minutes of an international airport; have direct access to mass transit; and be able to expand that headquarters to more than 740,000 square metres in the next decade.

Many cities in the U.S. and Canada, including Niagara have already expressed their interest in the project.